As we mentioned before, the R-Ladies Melb chapter was founded as the first R-Ladies chapter in Australia in Sep 2016. We are glad that today, there are five more chapters in Australia, including:
Over the last three years, The R-Ladies Melb has had growing number of members, and today we are glad to have close to 1400 members in our local community; this shows the existing need for an inclusive group for women and people of minority genders in the R community. The R-Ladies Melb had an amazing year in 2019; not only we registered the R-Ladies Melb as an incorporation, but also we received the Kellaway Excellence for Education Award from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), hosted amazing speakers such as Alison and Hadley from RStudio and Melina from the editorial board of rOpensSci, and contributed in teaching to high school girls. Below are the highlights of R-Ladies Melb in 2019!
Certificate of R-Ladies Melb Inc
Receiving the Kellaway Excellence Award for Education from WEHI
The R-Ladies Melb Inc event with Alison Hill
The R-Ladies Melb Inc event with Hadley Wickham
Tweets summarising the R-Ladies Melb Inc event with Hadley
We were invited to participate in the “It takes a spark” conference organized by Spark EDU in Sep 2019. This conference program is intended for both teachers and students to raise awareness and interest of high-school girls and connect with inspiring female role models. We organized a workshop on solving an outbreak using data analysis and programming skills. Our goal was to empower high school girls and their teachers to learn how to code in R and solve a disease outbreak. It was a great success as our workshop was booked out and it was a really rewarding experience that we thoroughly enjoyed thanks to the enthusiasm of the students to learn and solve all the exercises. This workshop was prepared by Marie and Shazia, and was helped by Sehrish, Shanmathi and myself. We hope this workshop inspired many girls and contributed to overcome the bias in the low rate of female participation in science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) education and STEAM careers.
It Takes a Spark conference for girls in STEAM
The R-Ladies Melb third year annivesary with Goknur Giner
In 2019 we were able to organise 13 events covering workshops, seminars and networkings. Although we organised a workshop to teach the fundamentals of R (by Goknur Giner and Nikki Rubinstein) and a lunch Zoom event on the basic data visualisation in R (by Zhuowen (Tobey) Zhang), this year we focused more on the advanced topics; this was because the majority of our members were interested in advanced R topics, according to our 2019 start-of-the-year survey. Examples of these events were:
Some of the R-Ladies Melb Inc events
R-Ladies Melb Inc Committee Members and Organisers
The useR! 2019 R-Ladies Global with Goknur and Roxane
Some of the other contributions of R-Ladies Melb members
Sepideh Foroutan wins an STEM Women Changemakers grant
To be an organiser of R-Ladies Melb, you do not need to be expert in R, use R every day, and spend a lot of time organising things, etc; you can be an R-Ladies organiser if you are passionate about R, supportive of diversity in the R community, keen to help out with event organisation and have a bit of spare time. If you would like to get involved, here you can find a brief description of labor within the organising committee based on my experience.
In addition to having formal roles defined by the incorporation (president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer), we also have our own internal roles. For each role, we have a main person responsible for that role as well as a secondary person that covers that responsibility in the absence of the main person. Alternatively, the two persons can share the responsibility as suits them. For example, Nikki and Shazia are responsible for the R-Ladies Melb twitter account, but for the events that Nikki was not around, Shaiza was the person doing the live-tweeting. They also check the R-Ladies Melb twitter account in turn.
Not only we follow the rules of incorporation, but also we have always had our own internal rules which all members respect to. One of our internal rules, as we detailed before, is that there is one/two main organiser(s) for each event, who does not actually do all the things herself, but instead is responsible to follow up with different people responsible to do their tasks (venue booking, advertising, catering, etc). In this way, the responsibilities are split between all members across the year. We also defined new rules this year in terms of our presence/absence in the monthly organising committee meetings as well as in our monthly events. Based on this rule, if an organiser is absent in 3 consequitive meetings/events, she needs to be contacted by the president and checked if she is still inetersted to get involved.
If there are things that we are not sure about, we can always ask the other R-Ladies chapters on the slack channel, specifically, the R-Ladies Global. It is important to remember that all we do is voluntary and therefore there is no pressure to have so many events in a year; the more we can do, the more we enjoy supporting the under-represented poeple in the R community, which is a great cause and is truly rewarding.
If you think this is something that fits you and your schedule, please get in touch! The R-Ladies Melb always needs motivated and passionate organisers!
I have been involved in the R-Ladies Melb chapter since the beginning, and for over three years now; two years as a co-organiser and last year as the president. During this time, I have learnt so much, not only about R and data analysis tools, but also about how to successfully organise events and how to share the work load as a team. I learnt so much about incorporations, found many new friends outside of academia, and expanded my network within academia.
It was a great but challenging experience to lead the team as the president. As a perfectionist, I always used to do everything myself, and so it was not easy to delegate work to people, but I am glad that I learnt this with help from other members, specifically, Marie and Goknur, whose encouragement and feedback gave me more confidence in my role as a leader. One thing that I used to do naturally though, was that I always ask the committee members’ opinions on matters as it gave me a feeling that everyone is happy with a decision.
It has not been just about R! This has been also about ourselves, our barriers and challenges. I believe the R-Ladies is a family where people offer support to each other! Sometimes this support is in the form of workshops or seminars, where people develop skills, which in turn may contribute to a more inclusive data science world, but other times, this support is in the form of friendship. I have experienced enormous amount of mental support from the members of R-Ladies Melb, particularly when I was hospitalised due to an accident early in 2019 and it was quite difficult to get back to my rutine. I know other members in the team, such as Goknur as mentioned above, also benefited from the friendly and supportive environment in this family.
Based on all the great experience that I have had as a member of this community, I strongly encourage you to consider joining the group as a co-organiser. You can learn so much by doing so and see how rewarding it is! You will also be recognised for your contribution as we were, and of course it looks good on your CV! I am sure you will love being a part of this community, as we all do.
In the end, I would like to thank every one of the past and the present organisers of R-Ladies, all our great speakers who shared their knowledge with our community in order to get them started using/making tools or advance their skills. It is obvious that without the members in our local community we would not be able to continue, and without the support that we get from the larger community of R-Ladies around the world we could not develop over time. It has been always the members’ enthusiasm and the community’s support that encouraged us to continue. THANK YOU!!
Our Amazing sponsors and the stunning view from the venue provided by NOUS
To be added later! I have asked Di and Lavinia to write something here.
Finally, do not forget to follow the R-Ladies Melb Inc if you would like to be updated about us and our events; we do our best to record our events, and make all of our events’ materials available on Github.
I would like to thank Marie and Goknur for their valuable feedback about this document, as well as Anna for her great reports last year that I looked up to in order to produce this document.